Indian Oil Refiners To Use Dirty Fuel ‘pet Coke’ For Power Generation

Indian oil refiners are drawing up plans to use petroleum coke for power generation and to produce syngas after the government banned use of the heavily polluting fuel in and around New Delhi.

The country’s top refiner Indian Oil Corp (IOC) and other refiners have invested billions of dollars in recent years to install delayed coker units to produce high-valued added products such as gasoline and liquefied petroleum gas.

The units produce petcoke as a byproduct, equivalent to 25-30 percent of a unit’s capacity, which refiners sell to local industries. But after the Supreme Court imposed a ban on petcoke in New Delhi and three surrounding states from last month to fight pollution, refiners are having to rethink what they do with the fuel.

IOC supplied petcoke from some of its plants, mainly in northern India, to industries in Haryana, Rajasthan and Uttar Pradesh – the states where it is now banned. It is still producing petcoke but diverting it to regions where it is not banned, its chairman Sanjiv Singh said on Tuesday. Read More…